


Wish Upon a Star

by Delatrista



Category: RWBY
Genre: Canon Divergence, F/M, blacksunweek2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-29
Updated: 2020-07-29
Packaged: 2021-03-05 19:53:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25590880
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delatrista/pseuds/Delatrista
Summary: Contrary to what his name would make people think, Sun loved the night more than the day.
Relationships: Blake Belladonna/Sun Wukong
Kudos: 11





	Wish Upon a Star

Contrary to what his name would make people think, Sun loved the night more than the day.

When he was younger, the night meant cool air on his cheeks. It meant a reprieve from the sun’s heat razing all life from the desert surface. He could hide for hours and never be seen in the moonlight, and that suited him just fine. Before reality tore his life apart and sent him into Vacuo’s alleyways with only the clothes on his back, he would wish on far-flung stars. Those pinpricks of light, glittering above like priceless gemstones…he coveted them, and would eclipse their light with his small childish hand as if to grasp them in his fingers.

His cousin would tell him a tale, so long ago that by now he could barely remember the cadence of her voice as she had spun the story night after night, of a man who had also longed for the stars. Every night, the man would lay among the sand dunes, and try to pluck the stars from the silk fabric of the night sky.

_“But he couldn’t reach high enough,” Starr said, and reached high above her head for effect. Back when the story wasn’t something Sun had memorized by heart, such articulations were novel to him. He would watch her with the round eyes of a youth he’d still possessed, and would mimic her movements with eager focus._

_“Why couldn’t he just jump up?” Sun asked, on the very first time she told this story. He flashed out of his sleeping bag before his cousin could stop him, and leaped with tiny legs on the shifting sands. His hands grasped for the air above his head, and he laughed. “Look! I’m gonna get one!”_

_Starr laughed along with him, and took hold of his jumping body with gentle fingers. “Because the sky is so far away,” she answered, and tucked him back into the itchy cover that he hated. He went willingly, though; whenever he refused, Starr would get sad. Sun didn’t like it when she did. He knew, in the way children aren’t supposed to, that she would wish his parents were there instead of her…and that made his heart ache._

The man wanted to fill his traveling pack with the shimmering lights. There was a legend that once a person held a star in their grasp, one wish would be granted to them. Anything they desired would become theirs, and the star would be the one to grant it…and this man had many wishes. A wish for the family he had lost, a wish for happiness he wanted to find again, and much more. He was a lonely man, and the desert was a cold companion. The stars were his only hope.

So he travelled, searching for the highest point in the hopes that he could bring himself close enough to the sky that he could finally reach the stars. 

One day, he reached the peak of the tallest dune he had ever found. He could look in every direction and see the flickering campfires of the bandit clans, scattered across the sands like the fallen stars he so yearned for. He could see the faint outlines of oasis’s on the verge of drying up, the fuzzy silhouettes of palm trees standing out against the navy blue horizon. But none of these interested him, as he was closer to the sky than he had ever gotten.

But even that far up, he still couldn’t touch the stars. And so he cried out to the moon, “Why can’t I have a star?”

The moon heard the man’s plea. Her shattered pieces watched as he continued to reach up and touch her sky, and she pitied him. He didn’t know that her children, the stars, were never meant for mortal hands. For all their radiance they were cold and unforgiving, and she held them back from the earth with her broken shards wrapped tight around them like a mother’s arms. They did not understand mortal desires, and while they could grant the wishes the people sought, they always demanded a sacrifice in return for theirs. By falling from the night sky, they abandoned the life they had above the world.

But he was a desperate man, and his life’s mission had been dedicated towards this one goal. And so, with a great sadness in her voice, she replied, “Because the stars won’t give you what you want. There is always a consequence.”

_“How can the moon talk?” Sun interrupted. His eyes moved to the celestial body in question, where it was slowly ascending over the crest of the desert dunes._

_“It’s a metaphor,” Starr answered. She smoothed her hand through his unruly golden hair, and turned his head away from watching the moon in awe._

_“What’s a met-ay-for?” His lips struggled to form the syllables, and he bit back a yawn._

_“A figure of speech, Sun. Now hush.”_

The man didn’t care about the price. He shouted this back to the moon, and pleaded with her to give him a star. He wanted to see his family again, above all else. If he couldn’t have the rest of his wishes, he wanted only that one to be granted by the stars’ power.

The moon listened to him with an open heart. She reflected on his life. She had watched his journey across the desert throughout those long, lonely years. The endless trail of footprints he left in the shifting sands. The tears he shed to water the desert plants. And she decided to grant him his wish, with the last few remnants of magic left in this world.

“You will have your star,” she told him, “but know this: all magic comes with a price.”

And with that last warning, she cast one of her children down from the night.

It fell quickly, and it burnt a trail of bright white stardust as it drew near. In its light, the man realized he could see his family. His wife and his children were there, just as they were in his memories, and they smiled at him. He watched them come closer with much love and sorrow, and he raised up to grasp the star racing towards him. This was what he had wanted for so long, to only see the people he want to be with.

“Come to us,” they called out. “Come here, we’re waiting for you.”

The man and the fabled star reached for each other. His wish had been granted; his family was waiting for him, smiling at him and speaking to him in the way he hadn’t heard in many decades. And once the star touched his fingers, the man was no more.

..:|:..

Once Sun left Vacuo’s decaying deserts behind in favor of Mistral’s towering mountains and its endless, gloriously tall and verdant forests, he loved the closeness he felt to the moon. Starr’s story always stayed with him, the broken man who wanted his family and gotten what he’d asked for.

He would still climb to the tallest point he could reach, whether that be the towering trees of Mistral’s forests, or the highest building in Mistral’s city. He would stretch out on his back, and reach above his head to place his hand before the moon and the stars. Despite the moral in Starr’s tale, the warning against wishing on the stars…he still grasped for them. The night may no longer have meant safety from the desert’s harsh weather, but it was still a comfort as he came to live in an unfamiliar land. And he imagined that the stars he wished upon heard his prayers for a better existence, for something more than the life he had been living listlessly. Something he could follow and live for.

He never did hold a star in his hand, and eventually his wishes grew silent. But when he found Blake years later, he was sure the moon had granted his prayers from when he used to whisper them into the night.

In the span of time it took for him to run past her on that fateful day, his world spun on its axis, realigning itself with dizzying speed as it came to orbit around a new point. Where once he had floated listless, he came to find a purpose as he walked through Vale alongside her and fought against vicious vigilantes. The night sky took on the ebony color of her hair as they danced together, and the stars which shone were the golden light of her eyes as he continued to spend day after day with her. With every word she spoke the fire in him burned hotter, and he yearned to be better for her each time she allowed him to get another inch beyond the walls she had built around herself. She was the moon to the sun that he carried as his namesake, her presence a calm and soothing balm to his endless energy, and he reveled in the way she complimented his every aspect. His prayer had been answered, he thought. He found something, _someone_ , to strive for.

But every wish came with a price, he’d been told. And his payment, it seemed, was to be separated time and again from her side.

The first time was after Beacon’s fall, when she ran into the night he loved and he couldn’t find her. Again, when he took lighting to his heart and she had blamed herself for his actions. And again, in a train station with the air between them filled with unsaid promises and goodbyes.

Sun would see Blake again. This was a certainty he knew, a universal truth that was as obvious as the sun rising and falling each day. He had been away from her before, and much like how the moon's orbit caused it to go dark in the night sky each month, she would vanish from his sight. But she always returned, and he trusted her to find him again. He felt that fated meeting coming with a conviction that strengthened his bones. But even still, he wanted the time where he would reunite with her to arrive sooner; he wanted to hold her in his arms and tell her everything she'd missed. He wanted to hear her voice as she told him the stories of her endeavors in the tundra, to see her before his eyes and not simply in his memories where she currently existed.

And so he took to praying on the stars again, once he returned to his homeland with his teammates in tow. They had come to forgive his transgression in abandoning them, but not before he had endeavored to undo the broken trust he'd caused by his departure. They were his friends once more, and they understood him better than anyone else, save for Blake herself. But for everything his teammates knew of him, no-one had heard the story Starr had told him in his youth. Scarlet, Sage, and Neptune thought it strange, whenever he would leave their shared dorm room to climb Shade’s pointed towers which reached for the sky like the desperate fingers of the man from the story.

But he wouldn’t burn under the stars’ touch, like the man had. He would only watch the night sky, he would trace the constellations that hung over Vacuo’s slumbering city, and close his fingers around the empty air that kept him from the stars and the shattered moon. The moon he had loved since he was a child sleeping on the dunes, the moon which reminded him so much of Blake that he couldn’t wait for night to fall to see it again. If only to have something that resembled her before his eyes. He didn’t need its magic to fulfill his desires, however. Not when he knew Blake would find him eventually. And when she did, he would be waiting for her with open arms, and a silent wish on his lips.


End file.
